Boffins create super flies that need almost no sleep In a scientific triumph whose significance would be difficult to exaggerate, American boffins have managed to create a breed of special flies which require hardly any sleep. The wakeful insects are the brainchild of Paul Shaw, PhD, of the Washington University in St Louis (WUSTL). According to WUSTL, "Shaw's lab was the first …
"Overall, the flies are able to perform better than they should, given how much sleep they miss," says Shaw's fellow fly-breeder Laurent Seugnet. "That makes it tempting to speculate that insomnia is like drug addiction."
Does this mean that drug addiction allows one to perform better than expected? Is this particular boffin implying that I should go out and smoke some crack in order to improve my performance at work?
The Vancouver Public Library has a film called, from memory, "Superfly" by a group called "films for the humanities & sciences", a brit group, I think. The fruit fly, Drosophila Melanogaster, carried much of the original studies on evolution and genetics in the labs of Thomas Morgan and was, IIRC, the species from which the homeobox genes studies and discoveries originated. It's a model species like the mouse and a portal for translation of genetic and evolution studies to the public sphere. Don't know if it's been subjected to studies of illicit drug use.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31M0j96uYPs
And the termites already learned to drive a car! Can you imagine how much knowledge these flies would be able to cram into their brain? Insectoid overlords, indeed!
* Maybe it's just a big marketing ploy, to sell more insecticide...
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